I was at a GAA blitz* all Saturday morning with Daniel. Most of the teams consisted of little boys only but one team was mixed and there was a really great girl on the team. The coach kept shouting out her name “Go on Emily-Jane, up the wing” and so on. Emily-Jane is not a name to conjure with in GAA circles I would have thought, but I was wrong.
*If these words mean nothing to you, lucky you.
June is always a very busy month with the end of school and GAA and the various outings associated with these.
We have already had the school tour (a day in a bog), the GAA finale, the football blitz at school, the school sports day (Daniel won two medals, hurrah), school end of year reports (all good, thanks for asking), the Church garden party (covered earlier in this blog – we made €200 on the slushie machine), this weekend as well as GAA we had my Sunday afternoon bookclub (your point?), the street party and a midsummer drinks party at a friend’s house. Next weekend we will be at a housewarming and a fortieth birthday party (whoever thought we would see 40 again?).
The children finish school on Thursday. Although sixth class graduated today (really, sixth class? When I was a child, you had to get a degree before you could graduate – insert harrumphing noise here). A very good friend of the Princess’s graduated and a couple of them went to the cinema after school. Crucially, without parental supervision. Great excitement. In addition, I am taking parental leave over the summer and hope to finish work on Friday until September. Fancy!
I think we are ready for the holidays. Also the weather is fantastic. I understand that that is all due to change by the end of the week. Alas.
I have long harboured an ambition to go to the Hill of Tara. We went in the teeth of the children’s opposition. The Rough Guide described it as resembling nothing so much as a golf course. That is true. “Hill” is generous. It bucketed rain and we all got soaked to the skin.
Notwithstanding all of this, there is something a little bit magical about the place.
As Samuel Johnson would say, worth seeing but not worth going to see.
My friend M’s father died recently. They thought he would make 100 but he didn’t; he had a long and happy life and died at home surrounded by his family. He was very well until the last year of his life, in fact, he only finally gave up driving at 95 and shooting at 92 (some relief in relation to the latter, I think).
M’s father was born in 1915 and his own father was an old man when he was born, having been born in 1845. When M’s father was young, he remembered his father telling him about people calling to the door of the farmhouse in Tipperary, starving in the wake of the Famine. It seems extraordinary that someone with such a close link to the Famine should only have died earlier this month, I suppose he must be the last person to have had a parent who survived the Great Famine.
Mr Waffle took the children zipwiring in the Dublin mountains. Where will this madness end?
One of the nicest things about travelling by train is that the free travel scheme means that there is always a good sprinkling of pensioners which is nice in itself but also they bring out the best in students (the other hardy perennials on the train) who are always very polite to them and help them with their bags and generally restore your faith in humanity.
Anyhow, I was on the train up from Cork on a Saturday and three elderly gentlemen, travelling separately fell into conversation about a hurling match between Limerick and Tipperary. One of them was a priest and one of the other men asked him whether he had ever been on the missions at all. He had – 12 years in Korea and 30 in Peru from which he had lately retired. Did he know the two girls who were arrested for drug smuggling? He did indeed, had spoken to them several times. He also opined that the prison where they were serving their sentence was one of the better ones in Peru, he having visited several others for many years. As Fr. Brown says, you can’t be a priest without knowing quite a bit about human depravity. Many anecdotes followed – the lives on other inmates, the altar boy who showed him a local remedy for swelling, how to handle snakes with a stick on the way to school – but my favourite related to Brazil.
One of the other men had visited South America and travelled around (our pensioners, an adventurous bunch) and asked the priest about Manaus. He had been there, he had much to say about the rubber trade. One interesting thing was that the ships transporting rubber had to take rocks back to Manaus as ballast. The last place they passed through was Cork and so all this Cork rock ended up in Brazil. He said that the opera house in Manaus is built from Clonakilty stone. I don’t know whether this is true, but I really hope so.
Here endeth the lesson.